Sweet Dumplings, Bitter Politics: Varenyky and Putin

Sweet Dumplings, Bitter Politics: Varenyky and Putin

My mama stood at our kitchen counter in Anchorage, Alaska, flour dusting the air, her hands moving in a rhythm passed down for generations. She pinched the edges of the varenyky just so, the way her mother and her mother’s mother had done in Medynivka and Korosten, Ukraine. She gently lowered each dumpling into the churning water on the stove. Inside each dough pocket, sweet wild Alaskan blueberries warmed, their juice staining the water purple as they cooked. These dumplings take time, patience, and love. In every crimped edge, I could feel our history.

Outside the warmth of our kitchen, the world feels unsteady. As I write this, I hear the roar of military jets overhead. My feet are touching the same ground onto which Vladimir Putin and his murderous entourage have just stepped. It is a strange, almost surreal sentence to write. My family left their beloved homeland in Ukraine to escape Soviet Russian oppression, and now, the architect of modern Russian oppression is smiling for cameras and shaking hands with the President of the United States less than five miles away from my mother, my daughter, and me.

Ukraine has fought for its sovereignty for centuries, resisting czars, Soviet despots, and now Putin’s vision of a restored empire. When Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, my family and I felt helpless. Though we were safe, thousands of miles away, our hearts bled for loved ones and for a homeland under attack. We saw a bombed Korosten, where my grandmother and mother used to live. A Kharkiv under fire, where my dad grew up. We couldn’t believe our eyes and ears when bombs dropped on Kyiv, where our extended family still lives today. On the second day of the war, I wove my hair into a Ukrainian braid. I cannot fully explain why, but it made me feel closer to the people fighting for their lives. Friends and colleagues asked how they could help, and together we raised over $16,000 to send directly, through trusted contacts, to Ukrainians sheltering and fleeing, in immediate need of food, blankets, and heat. This was not some polished international aid group. It was real people, thousands of miles away, moved by compassion to help people they’d never met. And on the ground, it was neighbors helping neighbors, sharing their food, paying for gas to get to the border, keeping people alive. Grassroots mutual aid. I still remember everyone who reached out with a kind word, or a donation. You brought a much needed hug when we needed people most.

And now, here in Alaska, the war criminal responsible for all that suffering walks free, a guest of honor invited by the President. To us, it feels like an insult layered on top of years of grief. I simply cannot sit at home knowing he’s here.

At the protest, I stood among beautiful faces wrapped in blue and yellow flags, warmed by solidarity that cut through the grief. Wearing my grandmother’s traditional shawl, I carried my sign in Russian: «Аляска против военных преступников и позорников» with a cartoon of a moose keeping a prison-clad Putin away (paraphrased translation: Alaska stands against war criminals. Putin and his entourage are a disgrace). The moose is our neighbor here, and in that moment it became a symbol of our land refusing to welcome him.

I know how rare this moment is. In Russia, people are jailed for standing silently with a sign, or even without one. They are arrested for holding flowers, for wearing blue and yellow, for donating to help Ukrainians. People delete messages after reading them, afraid that the wrong sentence could land them in prison. Even here, in the United States, some Ukrainian refugees are nervous to protest, afraid their immigration status could be threatened. Every person who stands outside, knowing what the consequences could be elsewhere, is making a choice that takes courage.

Will Putin see my sign? Probably not. But perhaps one of his entourage, those men working so hard to shield Russian citizens from the truth, might. Maybe they would have to look me in the eye and see a Ukrainian-Russian-American mother holding her child, and realize that Ukraine will live on. That we will never accept a Russian Ukraine.

They say we are all the same. Yes, we are all human, but there is a beauty in our differences, and honor in allowing a people to keep their culture, language, and history. To be brothers and sisters without erasing one another.

Here in Anchorage, we live on Dena’ina Elnena, the ancestral homeland of the Dena’ina people, one of the many groups of native people that live on what in now known as Alaska. Just as Ukraine resists being swallowed by an empire, Alaska Natives have resisted the erasure of their culture, land, and rights, and Palestinians continue the struggle to preserve their communities, culture, and basic human dignity. Our own history holds painful examples of what happens when sovereignty and culture are ignored. I ache knowing that our community’s Native leaders were not consulted before deciding to hold a meeting of such significance on their land. It mirrors the disrespect shown to our Ukrainian leaders by holding a meeting to decide their fate—and carve up the country—without even inviting them to the table.

That night, my mama’s varenyky nourished us. The same food that nourished our ancestors in times of peace and in times of war. The wild blueberries and soft dough tasted like a nostalgic memory and sweet defiance. We ate slowly, holding onto the truth that culture survives not only in kitchens, but in the streets, in the voices that speak out, in the people who refuse to forget who they are and what they stand for.